bull whip cracking and whipmaking by Louie

Tag: repair

Recently I’ve had a bunch of whips come in for new falls and repairs. I think it’s due to the weather getting better and people are going out to crack whips and remembering that fall they forgot to change in September.

If you have a whip that needs a new fall or repair you can get more info on those services by clicking here.

These three lashes needed new falls:

Here they are after the falls were put on:

This handle needed the keeper replaced:

Unfortunately I can’t find the picture of it with new keeper. When I find it I’ll post it.

The owner wanted a new fall put on it. When it originally lost its fall they sent it to a leather worker and they stitched a fall onto it.

While stitching a fall does get it attached to the whip, it’s going to make it a pain to replace later. Also when it was stitched on they didn’t tighten up the point of the whip, so there were huge gaps in the plaiting due to the looseness of the braid.

I had to cut off the fall, unbraid it a bit and rebraid the point. Then I tied a new fall hitch and put a fall on it.

This is why it’s important to send a whip for repair to someone that knows what they are doing. Leather braiding is a very specialized area of leather work. Within braiding making whips is a very specialized area of braiding. So you’ll get better results when you send a whip to someone that knows what they are doing.

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Recently I had a whip come in that was damaged by a dog chewing on it.

This lash was an older one and I found it very interesting internally based on what I could see. the core appeared to be sash core and very fine electrical wire. The metal in the wire that was exposed was soft and didn’t add any stiffness to the whip, and since it was very thin it couldn’t have added much weight. When it was newer the wire might have added a bit of rigidity to the whip, but with such a thin gauge it couldn’t have added much.

The wire ran the full length of the lash.

I made a 6 plait kangaroo lash to match it, however mine didn’t use any wire.

The knot had come off and the lash had started coming apart from the handle end.

My plan was slide the knot off the handle, replait it the lash, slide the knot back on and tighten it. However as I tried to slide the knot off, I got stuck and I noted some wire inside it:

It turns out this wire was originally what held the strands for the lash in place and what had failed in the whip. The knot and wire hand slipped off the plaiting.

The I undid the wire and used it to rewrap the strands once I replaited the lash. I also wrapped it with artificial sinew to make sure it holds longer. Unfortunately for me I had to completely retie the knot, however it ended up looking better than the knot that was on there before.

I just gave the whip a crack in my living room and was amazed it’s got a nice little crack to it!

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Recently I did a repair on a antique blackjack that had a broken wrist loop. Here’s how it looked initially:

Here’s a slightly closer up of the blackjack itself:

First thing I had to do was undo the knot:

Under the wrist loop there weren’t really any surprises, initially. What I did find interesting under the string was that the wrist loop was tacked to the spring foundation of the blackjack. It was just nailed inbetween the coils of the springs. I would have figured the texture of the spring and the binding with string would have held it fairly securely. Then thinking about this probably hanging from a policeman’s wrist or belt while they are running around all day those little tacks probably gave a bit of extra security!

Once the spring was taken off what was left was the bare spring foundation.